I have been as busy as ever building the Mouse House but because I tend to jump from room to room, I can’t share finished spaces as I have the last few posts.

A lot of my time has been focused on making books. I want them to be in every room so I need hundreds of them. Most of them have actual pages inside; some even have pictures and print. The process is tedious, but I like the realism.

Here are some samples:

A lot of artists make miniature books with a cover glued over a piece of wood or cardboard, but because I want real pages in most of mine, I developed a way to do several at once.

First I stack narrow strips of paper on top of strip of card stock. I then sew these pages together vertically down the middle of the stacked strips. Books that have thinner spines I use a straight stitch on my sewing machine while thicker spines get two stitching lines or a zig zag stitch down the middle.

Then I fold the strip vertically with the card stock on the outside:

The third step is to print out book covers from the internet. These can be hard to find as I want images with the front and back covers as well as the spine. Pinterest has been a helpful source, especially with vintage book covers. I resize these images, print them out on my Epson printer, and spray them with hairspray to set the ink. Then I cut them out and score the fold line along the spine.

Once I have several cut out covers, I glue them on the strip of cardstock/paper with the spine of the book on the stitching line:

Finally, I cut these apart and trim all of the edges to size. If it’s a vintage book, I frequently sand the edges of the spine and then “antique” them with a bit of diluted paint or scrapbooking stain.

I’ve made lots of children’s books:

And lots of books for the older reader as well:

I’ve finally made enough of them to fill the bookcase I built for the library; that room should be completed, soon!